A Song of Middle-Earth, by Way of Russia: "The Orcs Marched out of Mordor"

Here's the latest from Zoya, a singer with the prominent Russian band Leningrad (Russian lyrics here). It has over 350K page views, though it was just posted today (or yesterday Russian time)—I try to focus the posts in this thread on relatively prominent works, since my goal is in part to offer a sense of how some people over there are perceiving things.

The meaning is not completely clear on the face of the song, and as best I can tell, the band members aren't themselves particularly pro-Ukrainian—they are more cynical and realist than ideological, it seems to me (see this song, which I blogged a month ago). But "orc" appears to be a common reference to Russian soldiers by Ukrainians and other critics of Russia, though some say it also has other deeper meanings.

The orcs marched out of Mordor
In the last dawn
They were singing songs together
The fighting orcs.

About fate and about the foreign land
And about their mothers at home
And about the orc's cudgel
With which to kill the elves.

Let the whole world be in ruins—and fuck everything else
Let the whole world be, yes, in ruins—and fuck everything else.

Comments

[DaivdBehar]

Let us pray. May Putin die in surgery, and may his successor get assassinated by real Russian patriots.

[DaivdBehar]

Before too uppity about super-toxic lawyer, Putin, remember. Putin has not killed millions of babies nor stolen $trillion a year from us. Only the toxic lawyer hierarchy of the USA has done that. Putin could stand lessons in putrid toxicity from these internal enemies of our nation.

[Krayt]

Risky even if seemingly closer to neutral or obscured.

Putin’s error was not threatening companies, including publishers, to shut these people down or laws might get changed to hurt them massively, then have troll farms stimulate useful idiots to squeak how the companies are just choosing freely to use their own free speech.

[Ed Grinberg]

“But you don’t understand: these elves are former orcs, who decided they didn’t want to be orcs anymore. We must punish them for their apostasy!”
or
“But they’re Nazi elves!”

[mydisplayname]

The sentiment “Let the whole world be, yes, in ruins—and fuck everything else” has been decried before. Consider stanzas from a more venerable song:

Corruption sits in places high,
And Shoddy rules the roast;
“Fight on!” is still Corruption’s cry,
“More spoils!” is Shoddy’s boast.
But we, the people, sov’reigns all,
Declare our righteous cause;
“The Constitution as it is,
The Union as it was.”

Let’s heal dissentions and unite,
Then, stronger than be-fore,
We’ll bear our banner through the world,
The flag our fathers bore.
In many stripes and golden stars
Shall give the people ease;
And all th’ opressed of every clime
Will hail our happy peace.

The hot-heads South cried “Let’s secede,”
But find it doesn’t pay;
The hot-heads North cried “Confiscate,
And then we’ll have our way.”
But both have failed and always will;
There is a better plan:
We’ll choose a righteous President–
McClellan is the man!

[[Lincoln relieved political rival and Union General George B. McClellan on November 5, 1862, one day after the congressional mid-term elections. The author of the song, William Shakespeare Hays, was jailed by Lincoln.]]

[Eric VonSalzen]

Prof. V: Is “fuck” an apt translation of the Russian word? In other words, is the Russian word a vulgar word for sexual intercourse, that is also used to mean something like “reject”, “deny”, “despise”? I just wonder how universal is the equation of sex with rejection of disapproved views.

[Absaroka]

FWIW, here is google translate’s version:

Orcs came out of Mordor
At the last dawn
Sing songs in unison
War orcs

About fate and about a foreign land
And about the fact that the mother is at home
And about the orc club
To kill elves

The whole world is in ruins – fuck the rest
The whole world, yes, in dust
The rest is shit

[Eugene Volokh]

The word in the original is “похуй,” and the root is “хуй,” which is literally “dick” rather than “fuck.” But I think in context “fuck” is the better translation.

By the way, the “go fuck yourself” in the now-famous “Russian warship, go fuck yourself,” is likewise “Иди нахуй”; literally, it means “go on the dick,” but (as is often the case) the literal translation is not the idiomatically sound one.

[Ben of Houston]

It doesn’t have the flow of “Down Down to Goblin Town” or “15 Birds”.

Nor does it have the rad disco beat of “Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way”.